Fiorina: We rolled out the Adaptive Enterprise initially a year ago. So we have been evolving our own capabilities and building partner programs to help our partners evolve as we've been going along. A very simple example of what's different for our services organizationwould be the assessment service that I talked about before. Going in and assessing for customers, and this is something that partners, we need to train and certify and do as well. Assessing a customer's environment against time, range and ease. That's a capability we didn't have four years ago, even three years ago--the focus we have around ITSM [IT services management] and training ITSM capabilities for partners, for ourselves and for our customers. That's an example of an evolution we've been going through as a result of the Adaptive Enterprise.
Back to the earlier question of what partners need to do is, understand this, get lined up with this, build the skills and capabilities to help deliver this. But the good news about this is you don't have to be able to do everything to be successful. There are partners who add a lot of value in simplifying, standardizing, modularizing and integrating the infrastructure. That's really important. It's really valuable. Those four words that I talk about--simplification, standardization, modularization and integration--those are really powerful words and there's a lot of work to be done on those words. Because a lot of customers' environments are complex, not simple; they are proprietary and custom, not standard; they aren't modularized, which means that you have capacity in the wrong places, which is why most customers only utilize 40 percent; and they're not integrated, so applications can't talk to each other, servers can't talk to each other, and they need to. There's a lot of work to do around those four words.
Q: I'm curious, what does the channel need to do and you need to do to be successful in that space? Does the channel need to be built to be able to build a consultative process with process understanding? Do they need to know about how the processes happen and take a completely different sales approach? What skill set is not there, and what should they invest in? And what is HP's role?
Fiorina: I think the answer to that is something that I said very briefly in my speech. The first thing, and we have a session designed to help partners do this: They have to understand how to line up with the Adaptive Enterprise. So, one of the things we want to do with our partners is to lay out the piece parts of the Adaptive Enterprise. The standards, the partners, the solutions, the technologies. They're gonna get lined up in that framework. And the second thing is to begin to build skills to allow them to have their conversations within that framework. ...
Part of what we have to do is to begin to help partners build new skills. And it's not that everything you know is not relevant anymore--it's not throwing things out, it's adding to it.
